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Columbus: a capital idea

Request to buy this photoFILE PHOTOThis postcard from the early 1900s features the Statehouse — at the heart of the city and state government since 1861.

Request to buy this photoOHIO STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHYIn 1878, six men made up the first graduating class at Ohio State University, which opened five years earlier as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Request to buy this photoColumbus Metropolitan LibraryThe 1831 arrival of a spur of the Ohio-Erie Canal helped place Columbus on the map as a crossroads for moving goods.

Request to buy this photoWhen the National Road (Rt. 40 today) reached the area in 1833, Columbus became connected to cities to the east.

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Worthington, Delaware, Franklinton, Lancaster, Newark and even tiny Dublin all bid to become the capital of Ohio, which the founders wanted near the center of the state instead of the temporary site of Chillicothe.

Yet, in 1812, after years of political wrangling, the Ohio General Assembly chose no city at all.

Instead, legislators picked a forest on a high ridge near where the Whetstone River (now known as the Olentangy) meets the Scioto. The land, offered by a group of developers, was on a tract that the federal government had set aside for Revolutionary War refugees.

“The selection of the site for Ohio’s capital must have been more for what it might become than for what it was at the time,” according to Osman Castle Hooper’s History of the City of Columbus, published in 1920. “Along the riverbank only were there any marks of civilization.”

Ohio’s population had swelled from 1800 to 1810 — from 42,159 to 230,760 people. But Franklin County remained small, with only 3,486 residents in 1810. Jefferson County, home to Steubenville, had more residents than any other Ohio county: 17,260.

Nationally, the 1810 census recorded only 46 “urban” places, with just two (New York and Philadelphia) counting more than 50,000 residents.

Ohio was young — literally.

Almost 40 percent of state residents were younger than 5, and 55 percent were younger than 15. Less than a tenth were older than 45, according to the census.

Large numbers of American Indians also lived in the area, but they were intentionally omitted from census counts before 1890.

Franklinton, west of the Scioto River and a few blocks from where COSI Columbus now stands, had been laid out in 1797. But it wasn’t capital material.

“It was the victim of numerous floods,” said Tom Rieder, reference archivist for the Ohio Historical Society. “That’s why the legislature rejected it as the site of the capital.”

To the east, though, stood the “high bank” of the river, and a partnership with connections to Franklinton founder Lucas Sullivant controlled the land. The group basically “put together a real-estate package,” offering free land for a capitol, a prison and government offices, said Ed Lentz, a Columbus historian and author.

“These guys were going to make their money selling off town lots,” Lentz said.

As part of the sales pitch, they produced a map of where the streets and public buildings would go — basically the layout of Downtown Columbus.

“We’re not a natural city,” said Jeff Lafever, executive director of the Columbus Historical Society. “We are a planned city.”

Distinguishing Columbus from its flood-prone neighbor, they called their imagined main street at the top of the hill “High Street.” It sat squarely atop the Indian trail known locally as the “high trail,” a section of Scioto trail, according to a history kept at the Franklin County engineer’s office.

High Street would span 100 feet across and intersect with an even broader street — Broad Street — that would stretch 120 feet across, about a third wider than a typical street.

“We have a history of naming things very simply,” Lafever said. “Spring Street was because we had a spring; Mound Street had a mound.”

The ancient Indian mound was destroyed over time. In fact, workers used clay from the mound to build the first courthouse in 1807-08, a project that Sullivant oversaw.

In 1812, surveyors staked off plots in the middle of the wilderness where the “native forest still shaded the ground,” according to the Ohio Gazetteer of 1829, by John Kilbourn, provided by the Columbus Metropolitan Library. By 1816, Sullivant had connected the two sides of the river with the city’s first bridge.

The toll bridge was free on Sundays so people could use it to get to church, but it soon became a toll bridge full time, Lafever said. “The problem was, the people were coming back from the houses of ill-repute after midnight (on Saturdays) and were using the bridge for free.”

By 1818, Columbus had 200 houses and 1,200 inhabitants, eight stores, seven licensed inns, two weekly papers and “an academy for young ladies, in which is instructed most of the branches of polite literature,” reported the Columbus Almanac of 1818.

There was also a Capitol; state offices; and a state penitentiary that encompassed about a half-acre, with two wood shops and 48 convicts, the Almanac said.

Nonetheless, Columbus still doesn’t show up in the 1820 census as a town but rather as part of Montgomery Township — which was the most-populous township in Franklin County with 1,631 residents. Montgomery Township had no slaves and 63 “free colored persons” in 1820. The city’s free black population would continue to grow through the decades.

Columbus first appeared in the census in 1830, when it recorded 2,435 residents. But the arrival of a spur of the Ohio-Erie Canal in 1831 — and, two years later, the National Road — underscored the city’s growing role as an important crossroads.

The canal boats moved slowly but were loaded with large amounts of food, salt, coal or timber, connecting Columbus to both the East and New Orleans. The Columbus Feeder Canal entered the Scioto near where Bicentennial Park now sits across the river from COSI.

During this period, “the whole southeast side is full of canal boats,” Lentz said.

The National Road, the federal government’s first major interstate road, arrived in Columbus in 1833, Rieder said. It linked the city with Zanesville; Wheeling, W.Va.; and Cumberland, Md., and later would continue west to reach Indian-apolis and southern Illinois.

(Today, it’s called Rt. 40.)

The business community didn’t like the plan for the road to pass through town on Main Street rather than Broad Street, where the shops were.

“The business community was shocked that they would be bypassed” and negotiated a turn to reroute the road down High Street to Broad Street, Rieder said. A 340-foot-long covered bridge was built that connected to the federal road across the river on Broad Street, replacing Sullivant’s bridge.

From 1840 to 1850, the population of Columbus almost tripled to 17,882, putting it on the census’ list of the 50 largest cities in the nation for the first time, at No. 39. Cincinnati was sixth (115,435 people); and Cleveland, No. 43 (17,034).

The first railroad arrived in 1849 — the Columbus and Xenia — and several others followed, stitching different parts of Ohio to Columbus. Operating smoothly in both summer and winter, the trains were superior to the canal system.

By 1860, Cleveland would surpass Columbus in population; and by 1900, it would fly by Cincinnati, becoming the seventh-largest city in the country with almost 382,000 people. Ten years later, Cleveland would be the sixth-largest, with almost 561,000 residents.

In 1870, Columbus was a city of 31,274 people. That’s when the seed was planted for an institution that would eventually reap huge economic benefits for the city — the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College. Classes began with 24 students in 1873.

Joseph Sullivant — the son of the Franklinton founder — was part of the school’s first board of trustees and helped steer the school to broaden its curriculum from agriculture to the social sciences. The school changed its name to Ohio State University in 1878.

Joseph Sullivant was born in Franklinton in 1809, three years before Columbus was even an idea, so he watched the city rise from the woods, from a pioneer outpost to the 42nd largest city in the nation in 1870.

Today, Ohio State serves almost 57,000 students at its Columbus campus, 82 percent more people than the entire city had when the university started.

The city experienced explosive growth — between 23 percent and 71 percent — each decade from 1870 to 1930, when it reached 290,564 residents.

By 1970, Columbus had surpassed Cincinnati in the number of residents, according to the census. By 1990, the capital city had overtaken Cleveland, where the industrial base has collapsed as Columbus’ mix of government, insurance, research and transportation boomed.

Both Cleveland and Cincinnati still have larger metropolitan areas, but central Ohio continues to gain on them.

Cincinnati’s metropolitan area, which stretches into three states, had 2.13 million people in 2010, while the Cleveland area had 2.08 million. But the eight-county Columbus metro area grew by almost 14 percent from 2000 to 2010, to 1.84 million. Cincinnati’s population grew by only 6 percent, while Cleveland’s shrank.

Today, with more than 787,000 people, Columbus is the largest city in Ohio. Its Downtown towers over the high bank, where state leaders in 1812 decided to carve a brand-new city from the woods to serve as Ohio’s capital.